photo by Karl Picard

Our meeting was March 7th, and included nearly an hour of conversation with the Sounders’ marketing team. The first half of the meeting was a presentation and Q&A with Vice President of Marketing, Kyle Sheldon. They reviewed the look and feel of the schedule posters and banners for the stadium. They have put an emphasis on the Rave Green – back to basics for marketing. One other thing they have prioritized is standardizing things across all elements from banners to graphics and between different channels from web to mobile to different social platforms to provide a better experience to the consumer. Their focus is on local growth but thinking globally as well. We reviewed some of the work around the season ticket box and delivery including the Golden ticket promotion.

There will be a few new things, too. They will be deploying signs on game day to help fans experience all the game day events and activities. There is now a printed match day program (also available digitally) with a focus on the storytelling: March has articles on both The Save and Brian Schmetzer. The last thing we covered was the surprise: getting the giant MLS Cup, the very one from the match in Toronto, for the season. At the time of the meeting they were still working out the details but as many of you saw it is currently sitting behind section 124. Darla Langdon and Alex Eagleton are the follow-up team for marketing.

After a quick break, we moved on to a review of Articles including the Honorary Chair secondary reading. The article was voted on and passed unanimously. Next up was Article 4 and dealing with when the Annual Business Meeting can be held. The requested change is to ensure we can review the regular season that has just concluded rather than have it scheduled in the beginning of the season or some other time. We discussed the verbiage around how we deal with any changes to the MLS schedule. The discussion went into the ability of the Council to put on the Business Meeting without the help of the Sounders front office. Final was the updates to Bylaw 7 (Supporter Group) which was discussed with 4 different representatives from Supporter Groups (changes stemmed from the proposed updates to the constitution in October).

We discussed steps to take should Stars for All not receive full support from the league. Luckily, we got a temporary solution shortly after the last meeting. We will continue to work for a resolution where all teams going forward will have #StarsForAll.

We kicked off our meeting with a survey of Council members (private voting). The Rave Foundation is being supported and honored by glassybaby. The Rave Foundation will have its own glassybaby (shown to the left) and we are one of the groups asked to weigh in on what we think it should be called. We turned in our surveys and quickly moved along to the food and beverage portion of the meeting.

The February 7th meeting was the first ever Strategy Session. Strategy Sessions was a new way of working with the Club that was adopted last year. When the agenda was sent out for the meeting, volunteers were sought to be on the food and beverage follow up team. That team is: Martin Buckley, Cameron Collins, Alex Eagleton, and Mike Dollard.

Food and beverage at Century Link Field is undergoing an exciting transition. First and Goal Hospitality is the new entity making all of the choices with regard to food and beverages at Century Link Field. We met with Dawn Wheeler, Ashli Brown, and Michael Johnson. They’re diving into explorations regarding beer and cider selections (and how they should be different on tap vs. in 16 oz. cans), how large corporate partnerships can be respected while allowing the differences in Seahawks fans and Sounders fans to be honored, and allowing the quality and alcohol content desires to be met for two distinct fan bases: whereas Sounders fans tend to lean more toward craft beer choices, Seahawks fans tend to choose beers with lower alcohol content to help them through a game that is hours longer.

We had an extensive conversation about bringing in quality food choices that might be considered “alternative” in other markets but are fairly mainstream here in Seattle: fresh food instead of being high fat/fried, vegetarian/vegan choices, gluten free, dairy free, and so on. There are so many options available, that we shouldn’t be settling for food that tastes terrible or is poorly prepared. We learned that much of the struggle in the past has come from inadequate training, which is being addressed.

Martin’s son, Hugo, a ten-year-old vegetarian submitted his well-written thoughts on Century Link’s food and beverage for us to consider. I love receiving correspondence from “junior counsel.”

Below are some images of the samples the food and beverage team brought with them for us to taste. We’re not showing these to you to make you envious, make you hungry, or make you want to join the Alliance Council – those are simply beneficial side effects of these images.

The team at First and Goal Hospitality, Left to Right: Michael Johnson, Ashli Brown, and Dawn Wheeler.

After the Strategy Session, we moved into our own business. First up: Article 8, Supporter Groups. The first reading of the article change was read in November of last year. This was the second reading with an amendment to change the line “designated seating sections” for clarification. It now reads, “Front Office-designated seating sections.” The amendment and the Article were passed unanimously.

We had the first reading of some changes (for clarity) to Article 6 regarding Honorary Chairperson. It’s fairly easy to keep things going when people continue to serve on Council. But when there are large changes to Council, it can be confusing as to what can or cannot be done. So we elected to add clarifying language to Article 6 about the position of Honorary Chairperson. We’re now calling it Honorary Chairperson(s) to make it obvious that more than one person can hold the title at the same time – this gives a Council the ability to grant a youth team the honor if they chose to do so. We declared that if there ever were to be responsibilities of the role, they’d be managed in the bylaws – this does two things: it shows that there aren’t any responsibilities now, and tells people where they’d find them if there ever are any. Lastly, we declared how we’ll name the Honorary Chairperson(s) or rescind the honor should that ever be necessary. None of these things are changes to the process that we follow, they’re just now spelled out so that everyone understands that this is what to do in the future.

We addressed our list of initiatives for 2017 (it’s a lot), and got names attached to each item on the list. We’ll post those separately so that we can update the post and add to it. Those of us who have already started on our projects updated the group.

We finished with open conversation which was mostly about stars on jerseys – at the time, it wasn’t nearly as heated as it has become: MLS had not yet issued the cease and desist to the partner store which was stitching stars on replica jerseys.

Our next Strategy Session will be at our March meeting and we’ll meet with the Marketing team.

The first hour of the October Alliance meeting was a discussion around the Rave Foundation provided by Maya Mendoza-Exstrom – General Counsel for Sounders and Executive Director of Rave Foundation. The Rave Foundation is the charitable arm of the Sounders FC that was started in 2013 internally but official launched to the public in July 2016. They are a 501 c3 and a close partner to the for-profit Sounders. They have been working on community outreach and hosting events for kids and communities to get people playing soccer and getting soccer balls into the hands of young people.

For 2017 they will be focused on the following areas: building urban accessible fields (small soccer fields) in the communities that need access to soccer facilities, and creating a culture where pickup soccer can happen – not just the organized, pay to play soccer opportunities for youth. One such field that has been already built it at Beverly Park Elementary where they built a mini-pitch.

They have big goals over the next 10 years, 5 community small fields, 2 Seattle community-centric small fields (targeting iconic areas), distribute soccer balls (10,000) to area kids, and continue supporting pop-up games to encourage free play anywhere. The Foundation wants to remove barriers to participate in soccer, strengthen the communities, and all the ways soccer helps address challenges in our communities.

Yesler Terrace is the first location for the Rave fields (park around the Yesler Community Center). The field will support full field as well as split field games with goals on both ends and sides of the field. It’s going to be a unique location in Seattle and model for parks going forward. Not many places in the immediate area have access to soccer fields plus the right leadership and advocates in the community, therefore making this a great location for the first field.

Next up is bringing the Rave field to Pier 62 at the waterfront. There will be a semi-permanent soccer field that will be similar to the Yesler size. This is the doorstep to Seattle and contributes to the culture of the city.

The Rave Foundation has given out 292 soccer balls and held 83 popup games to date. They will be working on fundraising and the next locations for Rave fields by reaching out to communities and their leaders.

The remaining hour was spent finalizing some items around the Constitution and By-Law changes (which likely everyone reading this has seen by now), discussion around the scarf vote (over 4,ooo people placed their vote) and the Annual Business meeting, which is scheduled for 11/2. Executive Committee Member, Martin Buckley created this nifty survey if you don’t want to use SSFC’s or your question is longer than 150 characters.

photo from SoundersFC.com

By Stephanie Steiner

September 20th, 2016

On September 17th, immediately following our victory over the Vancouver Whitecaps, Sounders FC hosted a Chalk Talk with fans to discuss Club direction, challenges, and (surprisingly) took live questions from the audience. This conversation is the result of the Council’s repeated requests to make Garth Lagerwey, General Manager and President of Soccer, more accessible to our Alliance Members. We are very pleased that the Club heard us and made this event possible. We sincerely hope this can become something that happens multiple times each year.

I have been getting my backside kicked getting escrow closed (silly me, I thought that was the hard part), and now that I have the keys, I also have a new definition of urgent. So I simply did not get a write-up of the event done as quickly as I’d hoped. Today, Dave Clark got a great one posted at Sounder at Heart, and I highly recommend you read it here.